There are many different home automation communication protocols, wireless, wired, or combinations of wired and wireless in use today. Examples of home automation communication protocols include Bluetooth® including Bluetooth low energy (BLE), X10, xPL, ZigBee®, Z-wave, C-Bus, EnOcean, KNX, Thread, Universal Powerline bus or the like. Many of these protocols do not allow communication between devices that operate according to the different protocols.
For example, BLE devices cannot communicate with ZigBee devices directly and vice versa. When BLE and ZigBee devices are both located in a premises, this inability to communicate with one another in effect creates an island of BLE devices and another island of ZigBee devices. Moreover, mobile devices which include a Bluetooth transceiver but lack a ZigBee transmitter, are only able to communicate directly with BLE devices.
Since the ZigBee and BLE protocols are used to control a number of complimenting devices, it would be advantageous to exploit the home Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem as a whole rather than limiting it based on protocol and dealing with BLE and ZigBee islands independently. However, currently available IoT web applications and/or native applications can only list IoT devices according to the hardware capability of a mobile device. Hence, computer applications presently available for mobile devices only display BLE devices since mobile devices lack ZigBee transceivers.
Presently ZigBee device gateway applications only provide access to ZigBee devices discovered by the application. In some cases, the limiting factor is that the hardware executing the application does not have access to a compatible transmitter, receiver, transceiver or the like. In addition, there is presently no way to easily connect a BLE device with a ZigBee device on a mobile device. Even if it is connected, the mobile device or the application on the mobile device has to be ZigBee aware to know the actions possible on ZigBee devices.
Hence, there is a need in not only home automation, but premises automation (e.g., home, residence, office environment, industrial environments, and the like) to provide a capability for mobile devices to be given access to devices controllable via different protocols, so that a user can seamlessly associate actions to one type of device based on events received by another type of device.